Mountain beacons bring pilots safely home

In 2011, an experienced pilot was attempting to land in a mountainous area in the dark. Unfortunately, he had a problem with his equipment, so his GPS was scrambled and useless to him — a pilot’s worst nightmare in these modern days.

He was relying solely on what he could see out the window of the cockpit, as well as guidance from air traffic controllers, to help him land safely at the closest airstrip.

Since it was all happening quickly and at night with no electronic equipment to guide the pilot, the tower crew was woefully unsuccessful in assisting him, and he ended up crashing his airplane into the side of a mountain.

Fortunately, he survived the accident — only the second person in history to make it out alive out of 100 who had ever crashed on that particular mountain pass.

What is perhaps most interesting about this story is that had that pilot been in Montana, he would most likely not have had that accident, because of the lighted beacons still in existence today on the state’s mountain ￼passes.

About 90% of airplanes today have GPS units in them, but there are still pilots who fly at night and use the beacons, as well. You often hear pilots call it, endearingly, “flying the beacons.”

The pinkish-colored line from a GPS, which leads a pilot from one destination to another, doesn’t take into account there could be a mountain in the way. In order to get that detail, the pilot has to be looking at a separate map.

So, if a pilot isn’t paying very close attention while flying in the dark, he could easily fly into a mountain without the ever-critical beacons in the sky in the state of Montana.

In today’s digital world, some might argue these beacons are no longer useful, like the lighthouses peppering the coastlines of the world and now, sadly, falling into decay.

However, stop any pilot and talk with them about the lighted guideposts in the Montana skies, and you’ll hear they are anything but quaint and irrelevant.

Instead, you will get a sense of pride that the state continues to maintain a fully operational network of these historical, yet important, aviation flares through the mountains, north from Monida Pass to Great Falls and east from the Idaho panhandle to Bozeman.

So how did this network originate?

In 1925 Congress passed the Air Mail Service Act to provide, for the first time, federal funding to develop service for mail delivery via airplane at night. Working in tandem with the Bureau of Lighthouses, the U.S. Commerce Department developed a strategy to build an 18,000-mile system of lighted airway beacons.

Beacon towers were erected “every 10 miles across flat terrain and every 15 miles in more rugged areas,” according to the Axline/Hampton report, written in 2014 for the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1926 the work was initiated, and the first airway was finished in Montana in 1927, running north-south, connecting Great Falls to Salt Lake City.

“The last beacon erected on the route was the beacon on MacDonald Pass,” Axline Chapman wrote. “On Nov. 22, 1927, an estimated 4,000 people braved frigid weather to attend an event at Helena Municipal Airport to celebrate the completion of the beacon system.”

That same day in November 1927 in Helena, Montana, Northwest Airlines (only just auditioning in the commercial aviation arena), offered a night flight from Minneapolis to Seattle, with stops in both Helena and Butte, utilizing these illuminating beacons to safely get their passengers to their destinations.

The groundwork for the modern federal airway system had been laid and anointed in Helena, Montana.

By 1945 Montana had 39 beacons illuminated across the state, and the system flourished nationwide until the 1960s. By 1965, eight federally-operated beacons in Montana remained, all of which were located in mountain passes.

Another 13 were transferred to state control and operated and maintained by the Montana Aeronautics Division of the State Department of Transportation.

Today, the beacon atop MacDonald Pass is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is easily visible from U.S. Highway 12.

More importantly it still guides pilots safely through and over the peaks during the darkened hours while the light shines and sends its important signal of warning.

But today the beacons are becoming dark as the state is not fixing them as they break down.

The Montana Pilots Association (MPA) has thwarted attacks on the beacons in the past, noting they are a safety net pilots have enjoyed for many years. MPA officials say the cost to maintain the system is roughly $1,000 per beacon per year.

“So what is a pilot’s life worth in the state of Montana, not to mention those passengers who might be in the plane with him or her?” MPA officials ask.

Technology is wonderful but not perfect, and it will oftentimes break down, so I just hope when I step onto my next flight — whether it be commercial or private — all systems are “go,” because there might not be a beacon to bring us home safely over the mountains.

About General Aviation News Staff

Comments

I respect everyone who says the money is an unnecessary expense but in this case, it is literally the time it takes to drive up a mountain, climb a tower and check a bulb – and then not every one every year. Which is why I’ll repeat the comment above by Linde Hoff – it’s roughly $15,000 and change. How about this as a classic bureaucratic story – there was NO problem “until the guy retired” – that is the guy who did the annual maintenance every year. The new guy simply doesn’t want to do the simple job. And, so, a small sum each year, or a $2,000,000 additional tax dollars to take them out.
I can guarantee if AOPA Pilot or Flying Magazine published a story about how cool it is to “fly the beaches” on a summer evening the money generated by pilots from around the country who would go out of their way for this great experience would more than pay for the annual maintenance – to be able to see the history of how the airmail pilots used to fly?
How cool would THAT be??

I am in full support of the airway lights in the Montana passes It is not uncommon for a cold front to blow through Montanas mountains so fast, and producing such a rough violent ride that evening focusing your instrument panel on any technology is impossible. Technology is wonderful while it’s working, but can lie or go haywire. I have seen various GPS anomalies occur in the airliner I fly for a living. Trusting your life to a GPS flying through the likes of Bozeman Pass on a pitch black night is either gutsy or stupid, or both!

I don’t suppose there is a database showing the GPS location of the original beacons, is there. It would be fun to fly that network even if you weren’t using them to navigate. I have a friend that seeks them out on the ground.

I have been teaching Ground School for over 22 years. Even though I fly with a highly reliable Garmin GPS, I teach my students that I am also exercising both VOR receivers and comparing what everything is telling me. If I start getting different stories, I need to know not only what is failing, but WHY it is failing! If it is the VORs, do I have an a/c system problem — like a failed alternator causing loss of voltage? Or is it the GPS that is going down? THAT’s what I need to know!

If you have never seen an airways beacon one still operates as the rotating beacon at KSAF. In the 1960s pilots from KSAF rescued a beacon from near the Continental Divide west of Santa Fe. That beacon became the rotating beacon at KSAF.

Blane, do you have any news clippings or other info on the sourcing of the KSAF beacon? The last site on the Los Angeles-Amarillo ‘Green 4″ airway across NM was Beacon 61. This beacon was erected in 1930 at (storm-prone) Oso Ridge at 8700 ft on the Continental Divide, also the site of a Forest Service fire tower. It apparently operated until 1969.

One beacon — Spokane beacon — is operating with a LED that was donated by a company after they read an article in the Wall Street Journal in 2014. They had additional lights available for sale to convert all other beacons, which would have cost roughly $7,000 per beacon; however, that was not affordable to undertake at the time.

Indeed. Apparently someone on here thinks boat ramps are more important then pilot safety. Hmm…Time to rename the web site General Boating. I suspect there are a lot fewer pilots on here then those who claim to be one.

I would have to agree that maintaining these beacons is a questionable expense to the state on Montana.Since I am a pilot and have paid state income taxes in the past my opinion is that they should be phased out ,1or 2 saved for museums and spend the money on improving public boat launchs.Or the Montana Pilots Assoc. could take over the maintaince of these 60 year old beacons…

Just so everyone knows, these beacons only cost about $15K per year to maintain; however, there are those who would donate funds to take that fiscal responsibility off the state’s hands. Unfortunately, Ms. Alke refuses to interact with the pilot, aircraft, and general community to discuss options. She just wants to unilaterally shut them down. The lease agreements, however, require that if she does that, they have to be physically removed from their sites to pre-1929 conditions, which means ripping out the concrete foundations from mountaintops. This will cost in excess of $2 million, which doesn’t count costs of the power company and engineer personnel. Decommissioning them is no simple feat, and it is something the pilots don’t want, because they still use them! One is listed on the historical registry, and work is being done for the remaining beacons to be listed, as well. Again, Ms. Alke is not cooperating with the state’s historical society to get this done. It is truly a shame this Aeronautics Division that exists because of the pilots and aircraft owners cannot see fit to properly represent them.

I remember seeing the beacons as a child. My dad explained what they were to me. They were bright as we drove through the mountain passes. When the snow started, I would look hard through the foggy window of our 62 Chevy station wagon to see the next one in line. I was trying to imagine I was a pilot looking for the next beacon, hoping I wouldn’t miss it and get lost in the snow storm. Maybe those beacons and the fact that my dad flew an Interstate Kadet, helped build my desire to fly later in life. Wouldn’t it be fun to run the beacons in my 56 Tripacer on a dark night. Old man memories rekindled. Thanks .

At the risk of being a pariah, I will agree with those who say the beacons are obsolete and not worthy of public funding. Any smartphone can serve as a GPS backup these days, and a standalone GPS can be had for a few hundred dollars. All lightweight and battery operated with their own separate power source. So multiple GPS units should be in every airplane, especially if flying at night. Much more useful and reliable than the nerly 100 year old beacons.

My only comment for you is that one of the key components to safe flight is redundancy. And if you look at your comment you see the equipment inside the aircraft as the only weak link in the system. So all of your ‘redundant’ devices are based on GPS. What is your answer when the GPS signal is no longer received by the aircraft? All of your redundant systems will fail at the same time. When I first started flying everyone was talking about the magic of GPS and how it will replace all other navigation systems known to man. Well, we might have lost LORAN (no great loss) but VORs and NDBs are still ruling the airways, especially when it comes to approaches. Out here in the mountains there are even GPS approaches that are not allowed unless you have a functioning DME in the aircraft that is receiving the DME signal from the ground station. I fly with a GPS system, but I back it up by following the VOR airways with my Nav radios just in case something goes wrong. Sometimes the VORs go bad, sometimes the GPS, but when it happens the other system gets me home because they are completely separate redundant systems. And for the cost of a couple light bulbs wouldn’t it be nice to have a third completely redundant system out there keeping the dirt out of our engines?

I was going to post something similar earlier. Because I’ve been involved in D/R planning for a few data centers, this article caused me to give some thought to a true natural disaster and how one would handle it.

GPS systems can be jammed. And that jamming can be done by Ma Nature. History tells us that the “Carrington Event” of 1859 wreaked havoc on telegraph lines around the world. And there is nothing to prevent it from happening again.

So it is night when this happens: can you fly the “black hole” event to somewhere that you know you can land in that case?

Will the power grid survive such an incident? How long will it take the “primary” airports to come back alive? How crowded is 121.5 going to be?

Jesse, you are correct, and I too believe in redundancy. I have dual VOR/ILS recevers in my plane and though I rarely use them, I keep them in good working order and they are there if the GPS system should fail, leaving all 5 of my onboard GPS receivers useless. In the case of night flyers in Montana, I believe they would be better served relying on GPS backed up by VOR, than relying on ground based light beacons in the mountains. And any plane that doesn’t have GPS and VOR capability really should not be making night flights in the Rocky Mountains. That wasn’t all that safe when the beacons were constructed, and hasn’t gotten any safer since. With the inexpensive, accurate technology available today, to rely on those visual beacons is hard to justify.

Yes, well your definition of “inexpensive” and someone else’s might be different. There are those here in Montana who are not able to afford all the latest technologies for their planes and are relying on these beacons still. Are you saying, then, they don’t have a right to fly? Try getting your head out of the cockpit a bit more and relying less on the technology. You might like it!